Kate Pullinger is an English born contemporary artist who has discovered and attempted to reinvent herself on the Internet. The challenges of creating a unique literary form for conveying a traditional subject matter of scholarly literary creation is quite a challenge to visualize outside of a inherited rigid structure. While considering the possibilities of her online fiction she considered the evolution of the screen as a medium of interaction.
Her first piece of fiction was called “Branded” it triggered a new idea for her, a realization that the success of such a project would require, as a corner stone of its development, collaboration with other artists. Kate’s idea for “Branded” stems from her past experiences as a writer in residence at a British men’s maximum-security prison. In this prison only murders and arsonists are held prisoner and it is here she met men who were wrongly convicted of murder and became friends with them. Some of them are now free as new evidence has ked to their pardons. “Branded” is a fictional story directly stemming from the real life situation of those men. “Branded” weaves the story of a young man accused of killing his girlfriend. He finds that alone in his cell he can hear his dead lover talking to him from within the walls. It is a story told through an interactive flash based interface using a combination of sound and visual keys and effects to present text and convey the imagery required to progress the story. I found it very interesting she managed to reach the conclusion she did with her work although it not being entirely unique to the Internet in its final form. I applaud her ability to reach her end result in isolation from the already established early works of young internet artists which have created similar works on free flash player sites.
The part that finally brought Kate forward out of the ranks of those who had reached the same level before her was her integration of a new technology. The creator of this “tech” is a man named Stephen Schemat, a German artist she met in Munich. He was interested in incorporating “Branded” into a new system that works along side his own input interaction setup known as “Biotransmission Feedback”. The system allowed the story to progress according to how a person was reacting to the story of “Branded” by measuring their breathing and monitoring it throughout the story. “The Breathing Wall”
In the wake of this success in her story and technology incorporation she has received a proposal to develop a mobile phone version of these kinds of stories. The hook holding the episodes together would be leaving cliffhangers at the end of each new part. The idea is being funded by Pan McMillan Publishing and an untested free version is ready with 4 episodes available already. A primary concern is generating money off the internet of course and Kate is attempting to do it with selling true content instead of free content augmented by advertisement revenue. A harder route but one less traveled by business models on the “net” time will tell if this business model can still survive in the google/adsense era.
